The Safemakers and the Yeggs

Country banks, in the early 1800s were housed in crude buildings. Safes were simple wooden shafts or strongboxes reinforced with sheet iron and secured with padlocks. It was "easy money" for criminal to break in and smash the safe, or carry it away for "cracking" in privacy. So began the race between safemakers and safe breakers, or "yeggs" as they were called. Manufacturers started to build solid iron safes with key-operated deadbolt locks; yeggs soon defeated them by pouring explosives into the keyholes and blowing the doors off their hinges. For better protection, lock makers developed combination locks without keyholes, later combining them with tiny mechanism. Vaults of steel and concrete were built into the structures of banks. Multiple locking procedures were devised and so passed the era of the yegg.